


Day 3: Maze

by ApophisOfficer



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Nightwing (Comics), Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, Post-Season/Series 03 AU, Promptober 2019, Wordcount: 500-1.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-11-23 21:50:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20896652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApophisOfficer/pseuds/ApophisOfficer
Summary: The searing lights of the maze burned through his cornea. He no longer knew which way he'd come from not which way the fountain at the center was. Every hour that passed ate away at his senses with hunger and exhaustion. Dick was becoming delirious in his fourth day of blinding lights and twisting turns. The raw ache of his hands, burned and scraped raw from his many escape attempts, had gone numb a day ago, but he couldn’t bring himself to worry about that.





	Day 3: Maze

The searing lights of the maze burned through his cornea. He no longer knew which way he'd come from not which way the fountain at the center was. Every hour that passed ate away at his senses with hunger and exhaustion. Dick was becoming delirious in his fourth day of blinding lights and twisting turns. The raw ache of his hands, burned and scraped raw from his many escape attempts, had gone numb a day ago, but he couldn’t bring himself to worry about that. 

Every step was white walls. Every turn was white walls. Everything was cold harsh burning white. 

But… he shouldn’t be here? He’d gotten out. He knew he had. Dick shouldn’t be in the Maze anymore. The Court had no hold over him anymore.

He’d gotten out, he’d gotten back to his family. 

He’d- He’d-

Waking up in the dark was sweet relief.

The sweat-soaked sheets around him twisted around his limbs, grounding Dick to a reality outside those blank walls surrounding blank faces. The street lights coming through the curtains were nothing like the flickers of equipment surrounding the coffins. The sound of someone drunkenly singing was so far removed from the cool neutral tones that gave orders as to feel otherworldly. 

A glance at his phone on the side-table told Dick it was too early for him to be awake after patrol. It didn’t matter, he wouldn’t get back to sleep now. He could get up and do some work or he could log in to Barbara’s network and get some work done for the Team before their next mission. There was little chance he’d find something Barbara missed but they were better safe than sorry.

If he was going to be awake, he would work. 

He would check to make sure everyone was accounted for first though. He’d made a mistake going off-grid before and his own disappearance at the hands of the Owls had gone unnoticed in the wake of his withdrawal from everyone around him to “figure himself out”. He’d be damned if someone else’s disappearance went unnoticed when he could have done something about it. 

Okay, so that was unfair on some levels. Jason had just come back from the dead and his family had been preoccupied even months after. He and Barbara had been arguing more and more over Dick’s disregard for his own life for months. He’d wanted to try and figure out why he kept ending up leading despite desperately not wanting to be a leader in an environment where ending up being a leader wasn’t life or death. 

He was the idiot who decided to stick to civilian channels only while with the circus. His bright idea to not endanger his identity while in close quarters. That the circus would be the ones who handed Dick over wasn’t something he had ever even considered. They’d been family, yet they had given him to the Owls and made sure there was nothing suspicious about his disappearance. Check-in messages had continued to go out to his family. By the time he got out, they were still convinced he was avoiding them somewhere in Russia.

Only luck and being underestimated as a civilian had allowed him to escape with evidence to put the Court of Owls so far underground they may never resurface. He’d stumbled out of purgatory to the soft light of day in a Gotham alley and fled to a safe house. It had given Dick time to recover in private, to grieve the image he once had of his parents and the circus he was going to have to turn in for child trafficking. 

Dick still hadn’t told Bruce how he actually stumbled upon their existence when the Batman himself had thought them an urban myth and Dick was supposedly out of town.

_No. Don’t dwell. Dwelling is what gets us in trouble._ _Just start working and take care of the team. Check on Jason and Tim. We have more important things to do than pout about not being noticed enough._

Check on everyone. Read the brief. Ignore thoughts that wouldn’t help anyone anyway. He could do this. It wasn’t like it was the first time.

He booted up the computer, ignoring the spot above it where his family poster used to hang before he knew the truth of his existence. 

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this AU tumbling in the back of my brain for a while now. We'll see if it goes anywhere or if I just pull it out for one-shots this promtober.
> 
> Beta Read by Grammarly.com  
Thank you Grammarly for your good software haha
> 
> You can find my prompt sheet here: https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/854695


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